One Hoof on Land, One in the Sea
by Richelieu'sPen
Summary: OC: a capall that used to be human. (The story is from perspective of capall, Sean, and Gabe.) Snippet: "Shh," I hear him whisper in my ear. It sounds like the waves. I stamp and struggle, dance in place, but the ribbon is a stream of crawling ants that I cannot break through. The hands lead me away and the voice whispers to me of the sea and the sky. "Shhh."
1. Chapter 1

Due to the nature of my new self, I sometimes struggle to recall my old life. The details blur, washed away by the relentless tide. Even my old name is lost to me.

But there are two things I remember with absolute clarity: the first is the claustrophobia that permeated my existence _before_ , the feeling of the trap slowly springing shut.

The second is the night everything changed, the first and last time I attended the Scorpio Festival. The horse-head of the Mare Goddess, the crush of bodies and flickering lights, the cold, rough shell I held in my palm as I made my wish, "I want to be free."

The rest only comes to me now in streaks of shadow and dimmed colors. The memories are never reliable, and come and go like the wind. My father, a faded wash of pale color. An even more faded woman, his wife, lost to a mainland tourist and then to the mainland itself, gone like a sandy footprint in the waves. The way he would never let me out of his sight, let alone off the island. The way the shores of the tiny speck of land seemed to be growing ever smaller, constricting around my neck like a noose. The forbidden ships that endlessly sailed away over the horizon, the ones I was never permitted to board nor had the money for. I faintly remember I used to scrutinize them, but now their shapes are nebulous and distorted in my fading recollection.

You see, for the _capaill uisce_ memories aren't as important. What matters is the present; all else slowly drifts out of sight.

Every day the water grows colder, biting.

We can all feel it. Our slippery pelts itch with it. Every day the pull of the shore grows stronger, a music rising in pitch.

The herd has been thinning. There are fewer long, serpentlike faces with eyes narrow and stretched like slits, chasing our flashing prey through the deep. They disappear in the night, or in the chaos of a frantic hunt. We don't see them anymore.

The herd accepted me cautiously, recognizing that in some inscrutable way I was different. But slowly I learned their ways: baring my teeth in a menacing grin at the hungry, scavenging sharks; chasing with reckless speed the flashing silver fish and the waving manes and tails through the swirling water; the lilting, eerie songs that echoed here under the waves.

Now there are only six of us left, the few creatures of the sea as yet resisting the call of land.

It is night: I wake to hear a deep, almost tactile music drifting along the currents from a long way off. It twists and swirls, somehow finding the beating pulse of my heart and thrumming in my blood. A fish, short and flat like a grey coin turned on its side, eyes me with one glassy eye and darts away. The kelp sways, reaching for the surface. I follow the sound, pulled like driftwood in the tide towards the song of land. The song of warm blood and pounding hoofbeats.

Silent as an eel, I snake through the caressing leaves of kelp, the murky slope rising under me. Soon I no longer hear the low burbles and sighs of the sea's belly, but the crashing of waves overhead. With every step I get closer the deep, earthy song grows louder, more insistent. It pounds with the beat of my heart, a low, steady drumming increasing in tempo. It pulls me forward.

And finally, my head breaks over the waves, and I breathe my first breath of air, and my lungs seem to expand so much that I feel they would burst. The ocean's fists beat at me, breaking over my neck and threatening to send me under again. They tug me back, but I press forward, the feeling of breath too strong to give up.

I can feel my eyes widening, adjusting to the air, my nostrils changing their shape. The sensation of water running down my long, bony legs is so peculiar I snort and stamp my way onto the beach. The firm feeling of my four hooves in the sand is a triumph.

The wind, the _wind_ , whispers over the grass, throws up the gritty bits of sand. The night is still. The stars blink overhead.

It is all so familiar.

I recognize this beach.

I used to run on it when I had only two legs, the rare times the blur of a father I can barely remember now let me walk with him the short distance from our house to play in the sand. I can see now a path, worn, snaking away through the tall grass. In the distance there is a faint plume of smoke rising.

I had to see. I had to _remember_.

A wholly different song willed me forward.

Sean

 _You'll have a nest of horses outside your window and Puck Connolly in your bed and I'll buy from you instead of Malvern. That's your future for you._

A smile tugs at the corner of my mouth at Mr. Holly's words as I absentmindedly fiddle with a lock of Puck Connolly's wild hair, forming a bright figure eight in my fingers.

Mr. Holly's fantastical prediction had come so close to prophecy.

Outside my window I can hear the sound of Corr as he eats his bloody meal. His noises soothe me, as much as anyone can be said to be soothed by a _capall_. They remind me that he is here, that he is mine, that he isn't lost. No, he isn't a nest of horses, just one, but I would rather have him, broken as he was, than every horse in Malvern's stable. Even if he did come, Mr. Holly wouldn't find much to buy; I wouldn't sell Corr for the world, much less anything even Mr. Holly could offer.

Puck and I are lying under the roof I had talked with Mr. Holly about a year before, my father's house on the northwestern cliffs. Home. Though the house is small, with only one bedroom and a kitchen that doubly served as the sitting and dining room, it is expansive compared to the suffocating flat I'd lived in while working for Malvern. Most importantly, I can call it my own, and better yet: it has Puck in it.

She is lying next to me on the bed, her hair flared out over the pillow, the moonlight shining in from the window softly illuminating her features. She should be calm, happy, relaxed, but instead her face is scrunched up with worry.

Her eyes flick over to mine, and she asks- no, _demands_ , "Are you sure Gabe and Finn will be alright, in that house?"

Her older brother had come back from the mainland, and so we had decided that we should all stay over at my house for the night and spend the next day on the beach. I could not understand why, but Puck insisted that it was my "turn to play host." The only problem was, my house was too small to fit all of us, so Finn and Gabe were sleeping in the recently abandoned, yet perfectly serviceable, house next door. It was one of two houses that could claim to be my neighbor, both vacant.

"They'll be fine," I reply, running more of her hair through my fingertips. "They're hardly a stone's throw away."

She makes a small sound in her throat that is half agreement and half that-wasn't-what-I-meant. "Did you hear about what happened, about this time last year?"

"I heard the stories." I had been too caught up in my last Scorpio Races to pay much attention to it. The old neighbors, living in that house, had been allegedly attacked by a _capall_ that had somehow gotten inside. The bodies of the father and his young son had been found strewn in various stages of escape, looking more like meat than anything human. Only a woman who had been spending the night had escaped to tell the tale. The body of his daughter, about my age, had never been found. There were holes in the story, the most glaring of which was how or why the _capall_ had ever gotten inside. The second was the girl. It was thought that the _capall_ had somehow entered through her room, for that was where the rest of the family first heard it from, but there was not a drop of blood there. It was as if that night the girl had ceased to exist.

Puck frowns. "Your other neighbors left after that because they thought these houses were cursed, didn't they?"

"They were afraid."

Puck accepts the explanation, turning on her side and pulling the blankets up to her chin. "The ones that died." She pauses. "Did you know them?"

"Not well." I remember the girl, whom I had grown up with. We used to play on the beach before her mother left for the mainland. After that, she was never the same. "The girl's name was Ione." An old name, not heard often on this island anymore.

There was a silence.

"Don't worry about Gabe and Finn," I said, and turned over to sleep, hoping she wouldn't continue the conversation.

A cold breeze blew through the walls, raising goosebumps on our skin, It smelled faintly of the sea.

She whispers, "It's almost October."

The words hang in the chilly air.

"It'll be the first time in years that you haven't raced, won't it?"

So many years. The blood singing in my veins. The screams of the _capaill uisce_ and riders alike, all heard over the constant hush of the ocean. I can tell that beneath her simple question is a more deeper one, one much harder to answer.

The pummeling of hooves on sand, the death, the blood. All the worst things about the races, they have become as much a part of me as the island itself and the sea. Even now I can feel in my bones the _capaill uisce_ climbing out of the waves. And yet, this year, I can't ride.

I know Corr longs to run. Sometimes, late on the nights Puck has stayed home, he sings his keening song, echoing over the landscape, and sometimes I wish I could join him.

Lying under my father's roof, with Puck in my bed and Corr outside the window, I am happy, happier and more content than I have ever been in my life. But I am not _alive._

Puck narrowed her brows and looked out the window. "Sean, I think I hear something…"

That's when I heard the faintest of noises from outside. That's when I saw the outline of Corr's head jerk upright, ears pricked. That's when he started keening.

I was out of bed in less than a second, yanking on my shoes. " _Capall_ ," I hissed.


	2. Chapter 2

Gabe

It feels odd to be back.

I'm sitting with Finn on the front porch of this house, wrapped in blankets in front of a fire, playing with the cards I brought back from the mainland. Finn had grown immensely since I last saw him, before I first left, but he is still young enough to be delighted by my souvenirs.

His wide grin flickered in the firelight as he ran his fingers over the colorful prints. "These are even nicer than Dory Maud's catalog."

I smile at that and take the cards back from him. "Here. I'll show you how to play."

For a few minutes we sit like this, flipping cards back and forth in the near-dark, making quiet shouts of excitement or defeat at our victories and losses. Here, sitting under the stars that were only this bright over Thisby, it almost makes me wish I had never left.

Then I hear a noise, and though I would normally ignore such an unobtrusive sound something about it makes me pause. A second later, a low creaking, like a old wooden floor echoing out of a deep tunnel. My eyes flick over to Finn's, and his are as wide and bright as the moon. Slowly, ever so slowly, he puts a hand on my arm, telling _me_ to be still.

When did things get so turned around?

The fire had a minute ago been source of comfort, but now it blinds me. Outside our little orange ring there is nothing but impenetrable blackness, filled with horrors I could only imagine.

A soft _pat_. It could be nothing. It had to be something. It could be one of the last sounds we hear.

Another. It comes from only a few meters in front of us.

The first thing I see are its eyes, glimmering like polished stones in the light. Then its face emerges into the glowing ring of firelight, longer and narrower than any horse's face had a right to be, baring its teeth in a menacing grin. Finn's grip on my arm tightens, ever so slightly.

It is the face of death.

I close my eyes, and that is when Sean arrives.

 _Capall_

I remember this house, this widening path, and its firm reality before me strengthens my memories, gives them meaning.

I can smell prey here. Yes, much of it is old, etched into these stones and grasses and dirt, to last until Thisby sinks into the sea. But I can smell fresh scents, the scent of warm blood and mammal.

The taste of cold fish is familiar: it is home. But this warmth and heat, this is rich, exotic, maddening. My ears flick, back and forth, looking for its sources.

They are not hard to find.

They are surrounded by a ring of orange light- _fire_ , I remember. They pulse with heat- it seems to emanate from them in waves. I wish they would run, so I could chase them like the flashing fish in the sea.

I must make the slightest noise, for the larger of the two stops in his motions and the smaller one follows a second later. They sit, stock-still, like a pair of deer caught in the light of a torch.

I make a creaking noise, deep in my throat, a sound only the _capaill_ can make. _Go_ , I goad them. _Run, run._

I step closer, closer, feeling my lips pull back from my teeth in anticipation. One meal, one drink of the blood of land and then I would return to the sea. I step into the firelight, grinning.

But just as I was about to leap, something make me pause. Something in the older one's scent, something hiding underneath the smell of prey. Scents that require me to reach back into my fading human memory to identify.

 _Lavender soap. Green, freshly mowed lawns. The slightest hint of… cologne?_

This boy had been to the mainland. _The mainland_.

Where I had always wanted to be.

He closes his eyes.

Then, I feel a firm hand grab my head just behind my ears and pull me back, pull my head to the side. Out of one eye I see a flash of red, a twisting ribbon, fly through my vision. Another hand, wind- and salt-roughened, presses it against the bones of my nose. It smells like the sea.

" _Shh,"_ I hear him whisper in my ear. It sounds like the waves.

I stamp and struggle, dance in place, but the ribbon is a stream of crawling ants that I cannot break through. The hands lead me away and the voice whispers to me of the sea and the sky.

" _Shhh."_

I look at my captor out of the corner of my eye. Dark, wind-torn mane -no _, hair,_ an expression as deep and wild as the stormy ocean yet as calm and unrevealing as the water when flat. I bare my teeth when I realize that this is no prey, but competitor. His stance lays the truth bare.

There is something about him, something that matches a faded blur in my recollection. The way he walks, comfortably backward, leading me away from the fire, says that he knows this place. He walks it as I now swim the sea.

My skin twitches, trembling. I try to twist out of his grip. His eyes narrow in concentration.

And suddenly I've connected the image before me with the correct blur: _the neighbor._ Sean, the young boy who I played with on the beach before my mother left for the mainland and took my life with her. Always surrounded by horses. He would make friezes of running, leaping _capaill_ in the sand, his eyes narrowed just like they are now, tracing the long raptor-like faces and each pointed hoof.

I wish I could speak.

Behind me is the mainland and beside me, whispering in my ear, is the sea, and I can ask neither their secrets.

Sean

The horse trembles under me. It scrutinizes me with one dark eye, as if daring me to lose focus for even a second.

Its step is fluid, even when it sidesteps and struggles. Its coat is a dark blue roan, looking for all it's worth like the sea at dawn. Had I still been working for Malvern, I would have considered taking it back to the stables in anticipation for this year's races.

But this _capall_ looks at me in the eyes, its teeth threateningly bared, with a studying glare that reveals a dark intelligence by rights no animal should have. Its coat is still wet from the sea. My hold is as tenuous as spider silk.

Puck, Gabe, Finn: all of them are all around, watching me at what they think to be a safe distance. They know there's nothing they can do.

"Go inside," I say. "All of you."

A _capall_ that appears safe is at its most dangerous.

This _capall_ feels more dangerous than most.

It is a long walk to the sea, and every step of the way the _capall_ studies me and twists like a snake and my arms burn more and more with the effort to hold it. I trace letters, over and over, onto its vibrating skin. And then, just as we are about to step down from the grass-lined path onto the beach bordered on either side by high cliffs, it stops in its tracks.

It looks at me with that same glaring eye and makes a long, low creaking noise in its throat: _kraakakaka_.

No _capall_ ever made that sound while I held it in my hands and it gives me shivers up and down my spine. Its intent is unfathomable; I can tell it is not interested in my flesh, unlike most _capall_ , and unlike Skata it has no desire to drag me down into the water. It only looks at me with eyes like polished stone.

I whisper in its ear, " _Shhh… come to the sea. Come down to the sea."_

Never has a _capall_ _uisce_ been so still.

 _Capall_

With every second I stay in this place I remember more and more.

I remember one day, Sean came back to visit me at our beach bordered on either side by the cliffs. My father didn't know about it. It was the fall before Sean's first Scorpio Races, and we stared out at the ocean, looking for long, narrow heads breaking the surface. The chill wind whipped the waves up into froth.

"Are you nervous?" I asked him, tracing a seagull in the sand.

He seemed to search the wind for his answer. "I trust myself."

I looked over at him. His face was roughened by salt and wind. Already he was so different from the childhood friend I'd had. His love of _capaill_ and my father's strict prohibition had made us alien to each other. He had his feet firmly planted in the sea while I was rootless.

I resumed my tracing, giving my bird glaring eyes. "Do you trust your horse? Corr?"

"I trust him more than most." He paused. "I shouldn't trust him at all." He sighed and put his face in his hands. "If I don't make money for Malvern in this race, I won't have a job." _I won't have Corr._

The meaning of his unspoken words stung me like sand in the wind, for though I could hear them I couldn't understand them. I couldn't understand _him_. I turned to Sean, unsure what to say. "I heard he's wicked fast, faster than the others."

He shook his head. "It isn't the fastest who wins; it's the one who runs in a straight line. The _capaill_ don't stay still." He looked at me and something in his eyes told me that he recognized our estrangement, that he was sorry for it. "They're like the sea that way. You have to speak to them in the way they understand to make them go against their nature." He reached for my hand. "Let me show you."

Though I would likely never have any real use for them, he showed me all his ways of communicating with the horses, his little tricks. He traced letters on my hand, tied knots of threes and sevens in my hair. He sang and whispered in my ear, smiling when I laugh. He showed me his little iron pieces and ribbon and explained to me how his spit worked.

I was grateful. Even now as a _capall_ am grateful, but for different reasons.

The feeling of his fingers tracing letters on my skin brings me back to long-forgotten times. He said that the _capaill_ are never still. How would he deal with one that refused to move?

Now, as a four-legged creature that is not of the land nor the ocean but somewhere in between, I look at him out of my left eye and I am stiller than the stones.

The wind blows his dark hair; it rises and falls. I can see in his eyes his guardedness. He runs with the horses of the sea, he speaks their language, he knows them more than his own kind. But I am a contradiction.

He is afraid of me. For the first time, he doesn't know what to do.

For a minute we study each other, each of us not moving an inch in the moonlight.

I won't go back to the sea, not yet, though it sings to me. I am not finished here. But he doesn't trust me on land.

Finally, he leans up to whisper to me, his soft breath like feathers against my ear: " _I'm not taking you to the sea."_

My long ears flick forward, brushing against his face. My lips stretch against my teeth, I am singing with victory; he was the first of the two of us to give.

But if not to the sea, where would he take me?


	3. Chapter 3

_Capall_

The huge, dark stone buildings stand like a forbidding sentinel over the sea. Something about them speaks to me deep in my blood, something old, a thrumming that flickers at the edge of my perception. I cannot decide whether it draws or repels me.

Sean's expression grows even darker with every step we get closer. " _Malvern,"_ he mutters acidly under his breath, like a curse, when we step off the main road onto the entrance path.

I know that word; it echoes from a time when my vision was utterly human and grey with despair. Its connection with these old stones makes me recoil from them. This is the place where Sean had told he was going when he left the house that was next to mine and went to dedicate his life to the _capaill_. The Malvern stables.

I looked at him out of my eye, and now I do want to bite him, to rip into his flesh and make him scream and bleed. Not out of hunger, but hatred. While I was stuck in that god-awful house, chained by my father's broken, vindictive heart, Sean left me alone in my misery for the _capaill_. And now that I am one of the man-eating horses myself, he lives with his two-legged kind and takes me here.

To be chained again, while he walks free.

"Sean Kendrick?" I hear, spoken by a mammal ahead of us that smells like a meal. I hear it, and I smell it, but all my focus is on my captor and betrayer, the sea. The call makes Sean lose focus for just a second, and that is enough.

My head moves and my jaws open like a snake when striking. My speed is faster than lightning. His head jerks back with less than a millimeter to spare. My teeth scrape on his cheekbone and close with a _clack_.

"Sean Kendrick?!" I hear the other one say, with a voice imbued with panic.

"Get me a rope," Sean growls low, and he presses two iron pieces against my face, making it burn and sting like a hive of hornets. They force me back, though I still lunge for another attack, my jaws snapping together. It takes all his strength to keep me at bay; I can see his arms quivering.

The other voice is high-pitched, afraid. "Yes. A rope." He sprints away.

Sean's cheek is bleeding and starting to bruise. His focus is razor-sharp and his expression grim as submerged stones. He wraps the ribbon around my face twice with meticulous precision.

Even subdued, I feel triumphant at the sight of the blood slowly trickling down his chin, at my small victory. An older part, the one I was born with, the one eroded by the sea, is deeply and irrevocably disturbed. I push that part away and grin, that grin lined with the sharp rocks of the ocean upon which ships dash themselves and sink.

Sean eyes me with a gaze that never wavers, not taking his eyes off me even when accepting the rope from the Malvern stablehand. At the end of it is a harness, a cloth prison that envelops my face.

"What brings you here, Sean Kendrick?" the stablehand asks with forced nonchalance, eyeing me with eyes that quivered at the edges, only flickering to Sean's occasionally. "I thought you… uh… left?"

"Find me an empty stable, Jonathan."

Jonathan's voice is tight from prey-fear. "Oh, uh, right. This way." He walks with legs like wood towards the dark stone buildings. He pauses and an anxious frown that he tries unsuccessfully to shed appears on his face. He proffers a shaking hand. "Do you want me to take the horse?"

"No."

The stablehand's face nearly falls limp with relief. "Oh, alright."

In the dark night, the three of us approach the ancient source of the thrumming that fills my veins. From within I begin to hear and smell other horses, both the hay-scented land kind and my predatory compatriots from the sea. I recognize a _capall_ from my watery hunts and I make a soft, high-pitched keening noise that vibrates in my sinuses. It echoes in the air, matched by a response from deep within the shadows.

Sean yanks down on my lead, silencing me. " _Quiet,_ " he whispers.

The stablehand seems as shaken as if he had been struck by lightning, and has to take some time to calm himself.

Inside, my eyes confirm what the thrumming had told me earlier. The barn speaks of times long forgotten. The eyes of the horse-headed people, who top columns made of men crushed under the weight of the ceiling, seem to stare at me as I am lead past.

My skin itches. The frames are made of iron, and each stall has iron bars on the front of it. My hoofsteps make ringing sounds in the quiet of the barn, and Sean seems to simultaneously keep one eye on me and one eye on the path ahead.

Finally, Jonathan says, gesturing to a couple empty stables, "These are them. We only have the one _capall_ , since you left, and the land horses don't like the stalls that used to have water horses in them a bit ago. So we have a few empty ones."

Sean says nothing, but opens the door and uses the stinging iron to press me inside. The door makes a squeaking _clang_ noise when it shuts.

"Can I ask you something, Sean Kendrick?" Jonathan coughs. "It's not often that one of them _capaill_ nips _you_. And you don't seem to be really beholden or anything to Mr. Malvern. So why did you bring this this one here?"

My ears flick forward to hear his response.

He only replies, "Don't let this horse out of your sight."

Then he walks away.

...

During what could be either an old night or an early morning I open one eye. The sky is still a pitch black.

I had not slept. On all sides I am surrounded by stone, iron, and horses and the only thoughts that enter my head are those of escape.

My ears flick. Everywhere the only sounds I hear and scents I smell are those of land mammals. My empty stomach and their smell makes my appetite sharp, but I know that going after one of them would be a mistake. My only goal is escape.

There are no humans around.

My first instinct is to kick the stall, and kick it _hard_ , but my first three attempts in that direction sends such pain blossoming in my left rear ankle that I know I cannot continue. However, the image of the walls falling down like dominoes throughout the stable remains a compelling, if nonsensical, image.

Frustrated, I look towards the door of my stall, though the iron frame and bars repel me. It makes my skin buzz, a feeling akin to the pins and needles I used to feel, but amplified to an extent that is unbearable.

There is a place where several bars in the row have been removed, forming a small window, likely for the use of the land horses to put their heads out. Even being within a few feet of the iron bars is almost more than I can handle.

I eye it. I try to recall the logic my mind specialized in before I left the land for the sea. Every fiber of my _capall_ body is telling me to get away, get away. But some strengthening vestige of my old self tells me that the window holds an opportunity.

If it was only a matter of fitting my head through the opening, I would have no issue. The problem is that that would require my neck to touch the iron on four sides. A line of hornets around my neck, stinging me every second.

If I do get my head through the window, there is little likelihood that even then I could find a way to escape. But if I don't, the probability of escape is zero.

I take a step closer, limping slightly. Then another.

It's too much. The stinging, the buzzing, is unbearable. I leap away.

I turn back and eye the window with a growl. Escape _would_ be mine. I have to return to the house, to the man that smells like the mainland, even to my childhood friend and betrayer, to recall the memories that had faded so quickly as a _capall_ before they fade forever.

The pain that accompanies the feeling of the iron flush against my neck is more excruciating than anything I have ever felt. I can barely think. I look around wildly, the dark grey of the stable swimming in my vision, until I notice a dark shape directly below me.

I have to search back for the function of this object, the name.

It is a handle.

Frantically, the buzzing building in volume, I push down on it.

It doesn't budge.

I can almost see the time I have left before I cannot withstand my screaming nerve endings dribbling away.

I remember -a brief image- of Sean turning the handle. How did he turn it? How did he do it? Finally I see.

I hook the handle's edge with my teeth and pull _up_.

The door opens with a _click_ and a creak. _Kraakakakaka._

I step out into the cool air. The only sounds are the quiet ones of the horses and the soft wind blowing.

I am a _capall_ in the Malvern stables at night and I am _free_.

...

A/N: Thank you so much for reading. This is my first fanfiction and I really want to improve my writing as much as possible. I would love any feedback or reviews (positive or negative). Let me know what you think!


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